Remember those ‘diet breads’: 25% fewer calories per slice?
Achieved by 25% smaller slices? Outsourcing companies have
used the same ruse to win vast government contracts. Promising great savings (slimming down),
achieved by employing fewer and less qualified people and paying them less
(less bread).

Diet breads charged you more to give you less.You risk your
health if you don’t understand this. The Tories didn't understand (or perhaps more shamefully, they did). Their fetish for slimming down the Public Sector is
proving to be more than unhealthy for Britain. Cutting costs has its price:
unqualified teachers in “free schools”; unqualified translators and underqualified barristers in the legal aid system; paramedics doing what doctors
used to do; reservists doing what the professional army used to do. And there is more.

“Understaffing remains a real
issue across the NHS, and we know that many trusts are down to the bone in
terms of the number of frontline nursing staff they have due to cutting posts
to save money....Unsafe staffing levels have been
implicated in a number of high-profile investigations into patient safety.”

“Under Army 2020, by December 2018 the number of
trained regular soldiers in the Army needs to be reduced by around 20,000 (down
from 102,000); and, by the end of 2018-19, the number of trained reserve
soldiers needs to be increased by at least 11,000 (up from around 19,000)…..
However, the Department did not test whether it was feasible to recruit and
train the required number of reserves by 2018-19."

“budget cuts had led to the CPS losing 23% of its barristers
(202), 22% of its solicitors (518) and 27% (296) of its higher court advocates.

That loss in staff correlated
with an increase in the rate at which homicide trials failed because the CPS
provided insufficient or no evidence after a not guilty plea. This was
equivalent to one in twenty homicide cases and represented a rise of 50%
compared with 2010. The rate at which the CPS offers ‘no evidence’ had
also risen for burglary, robbery, fraud and forgery, and criminal damage
trials.”

Problems ran through the courts into the jails. In June 2014 the BBC reported:

“The
Ministry of Justice has ordered dozens of already full jails to take more
prisoners because the jail population is increasing faster than expected, it
has emerged…. Some facilities are already at 150-160% capacity”

"the order to take in more prisoners is very embarrassing for the
Ministry of Justice, which has closed 16 jails in the past four years."

On the same day, the BBC also reported
that ninety prisoners were on the run from Ford Open Prison in West Sussex.
Nick Gibb, Conservative MP for West Sussex, said:

“It's
becoming a pattern. It says to me the wrong people are being sent to Ford Open
Prison…. I sense that because of the constraints on capacity in the prison
service that mistakes are being made in that assessment process,"

2014 started with catastrophic flooding in large parts of
England. After early denials from David Cameron, DEFRA published figures
showing how spending on flood defences had been cut both in real and nominal terms since the 2010 election.

The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) finally had the
towel thrown in on its ‘Universal Credit’ money-saving idea. Having spent £140
million, the government’s Major Projects Authority (MPA) “reset” the project back to the drawing board.

Which is about par for the course
from the DWP where the backlog processing benefits by the outsourcing company
ATOS, and Personal Independence Payments (PIP) by the outsourcing company
Capita, has hit hundreds of thousands of people. The BBC reported:

Dyed-in-the-wool Tories know there is at least one person
with a plan to deal with the consequences of all this Austerity. Sporting the reassuring dynamism and blonde curls of a Flash Gordon, Boris “Splash”
Johnson has bought some second hand (i.e. austerely cheap) water cannon from
the Germans. For why? The Association
of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) have given their opinion in no uncertain terms in a letter supporting the purchase:

“it would be fair to assume that the ongoing and
potential future austerity measures are likely to lead to continued protest... In addition, the social and economic factors that are
currently being experienced have the potential, when combined with a
significant (and often spontaneous) “trigger” event, to lead to the outbreak of
significant disturbances.”

“Since 1973, there has been one instance of
contracting annual output in every decade. These occurred in 1974/75, 1980/81,
1991 and 2008/09.”

The dismal truth is the temporary economic bust of 2008 is being used as cover to permanently reduce the share of national wealth that is spent on the nation. And all the above doesn't even mention permanent cuts to pensions, welfare, job security and more, all done in the name of "austerity".

6 comments:

Reported in the Guardian:"David Cameron warned NHS in danger of collapse within five years.Former Tory health minister Stephen Dorrell calls for more spending as King's Fund raises fears over shortage of doctors...

For the past four years, the government has ringfenced the health service budget from cuts and raised funding in line with inflation, but largely relied on efficiency savings to pay for a growing demand for its services."http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/28/cameron-warned-nhs-in-danger-of-collapse

Except that's a lie - they haven't "ring-fenced" - the Treasury grabbed back £2billion in underspending last year alone.

Also last year, Jeremy Hunt spent £1.4bn on NHS redundancies - then spent £3.9 billion filling the gaps with temporary agency staff in the NHS – tripling costs in just 3 years. The temp agencies concerned which are private charge up to £1,000 for a shift.... go figure...

"Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has admitted to the BBC that prisons in England and Wales face problems with violence, suicides and staff shortages. But he maintained there was "not a crisis in our prisons", saying the government was meeting the challenges of a rising prison population. It comes as the Isis Young Offenders Institution in London is criticised by inspectors in an official report. High levels of violence were reported at the prison, often involving weapons."

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-error-george-osborne-austerity"The theories on which the chancellor based his cuts policies have been shown to be based on an embarrassing mistake"

As reported in the Guardian, austerity is based on a simple error in an excel spreadsheet. Get over it! And please, stop the useless cuts.

“Local authorities have worked hard to manage reductions in government funding at a time of austerity. At the same time, there is evidence of some service reductions.The Department really needs to be better informed about the situation on the ground among local authorities across England, in a much more active way, in order to head off serious problems before they happen. It should look for evidence of financial stress in local authorities to assure itself that they are able to deliver the services for which they are responsible. It should be clear about the knock-on effect of the various funding decisions taken by departments in Whitehall.”

"In implementing the reforms, the Ministry did not think through the impact of thechanges on the wider system early enough. It is only now taking steps to understandhow and why people who are eligible access civil legal aid. The Ministry needs toimprove its understanding of the impact of the reforms on the ability of providers to meetdemand for services. Without this, implementation of the reforms to civil legal aid cannotbe said to have delivered better overall value for money for the taxpayer."